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How can I accept bitcoins? – Three easy ways to start accepting bitcoin today

How can I accept bitcoins? – Three easy ways to start accepting bitcoin today

So you want to know how you can accept bitcoins at your business? Over 100,000 merchants worldwide now accept bitcoins as a form of payment. There are many good reasons for doing so:

If you already own a business, this is the easiest way to get bitcoins.

Bitcoin has no third-party in the middle to arbitrarily decide to chargeback your merchant account.

You can accept bitcoins almost free–no more 3% credit card fees!

The tech (read: online) world is full of bitcoin enthusiasts. If you don’t accept bitcoins, they will find someone who does.

For these or a myriad of other reasons, you have now decided to start accepting bitcoins as a form of payment at your business or website. Now what?

There are 3 main options when it comes to accepting bitcoin online:

1. If you are just starting out and don’t expect too many purchases per day, you can simply choose a bitcoin wallet from bitcoin.org, put a bitcoin accepted graphic from google images up on your site (or just right click and save the one here), and have customers who want to pay with bitcoin email you asking for a bitcoin address (which you copy from your bitcoin wallet and paste into an email reply).

2. If you are already on shopify or you have not yet set up your shop, you can set up on shopify and simply choose bitcoin as a payment option in your profile. This is one of the easiest ways to accept bitcoin for your online shop.

3. If you already have a website set up somewhere and bitcoin is not a shopping cart option in your software, you can use bitpay as a payment processor. Bitpay allows you to either accept bitcoin directly or to have them put your national currency into your bank account based on the actual purchase price in your currency (for an astronomically smaller fee than Visa & Mastercard take, let alone American Express).

“But my business is brick-and-mortar”

If you would like to accept bitcoin at a brick and mortar business, bitpay is definitely the best option for you. If you use SoftTouch POS, you can actually integrate bitcoin directly into your POS system through bitpay. Otherwise, bitpay offers a free app that works on any web-enabled smart phone to augment your existing POS system.

Whichever way you choose, by accepting bitcoin today, you get ahead of the curve, and if you are good at your business, you can earn the loyalty of we bitcoin enthusiasts and our friends for years to come! And once you are accepting bitcoin, don’t forget to let the world know by creating a free profile for your business here.